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By John Walters
Senior Sports Writer
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Geno Auriemma now has more rings than fingers.
The University of Connecticut secured its 11th national championship in women's basketball under Auriemma Tuesday night with an 82-51 defeat of Syracuse in Indianapolis. Except for the third quarter, during which the Orange took off on a 17-0 run to cut the Huskies' lead in half, this resembled a contest less than it did a coronation.
This night, which concluded with the Huskies' three first-team All-American seniors playfully knighting one another at midcourt with a sword, was the final step of a conquest the likes of which men's or women's college basketball has never seen. To wit:
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- This was Auriemma's 11th national championship in his past 22 seasons at UConn (he arrived 10 years earlier, in 1985), which gives him one more than UCLA's legendary John Wooden, who coached the Bruins' men's teams from 1948 to 1975. Like Wooden, whose UCLA squads were 10-0 in NCAA championship games, Auriemma has a perfect record, 11-0, in title contests.
- Connecticut became the first Division I basketball team, men's or women's, to win four consecutive national championships. Its three senior All-Americans, forwards Breanna Stewart and Morgan Tuck and point guard Moriah Jefferson, are the first players to win four titles in four years. Stewart, a 6-foot-4-inch native of upstate New York, became the first player in college basketball history to win four NCAA tournament Most Outstanding Player (MOP) awards.
- The Huskies concluded their sixth undefeated season under Auriemma. In the history of Division I men's basketball, there have been just seven perfect seasons.
- Almost as a footnote, the Huskies won their 75th consecutive game. UConn also had win streaks of 90 and 70 games under Auriemma. Since the start of the 2013 NCAA tournament, Connecticut is 122-1, the lone defeat coming by two points in overtime at Stanford in November 2014.
For most of this historic season, Auriemma, whose family emigrated from Italy when he was 7, employed the words of Julius Caesar to motivate his team: "Veni, vidi, vici" (We came, we saw, we conquered). "They know I'm a history buff, so before a game earlier this season, I think it was at Ohio State, I said to them, 'Let's just be like the Roman legions and go out and conquer everyone,'" Auriemma told ESPN's Holly Rowe during the postgame trophy presentation. "And they got a kick out of that."
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Perfection is a criminally overused term, but the Huskies were precisely that this season. Besides the 38-0 record this year and a fourth consecutive national title, UConn led the nation in points scored as well as in fewest points allowed. They were outscored in just three of 24 quarters during their six-game NCAA tourney run, and two of those three quarters were fourth quarters the Huskies entered leading by 60 or more points.
Pax Auriemma, which began in 1995 with Connecticut's first perfect (35-0) season and its first national championship (as well as its first of 10 Naismith Players of the Year, Rebecca Lobo), has come to resemble lions versus Christians in the arena more than it has basketball. After one quarter in the opening game of the tourney versus Robert Morris, the Huskies led 41-4. Two games later, in a Sweet 16 matchup versus Mississippi State, the Huskies led 32-4.
This season, only two schools, third-ranked Notre Dame and sixth-ranked Maryland, came within 10 points of the Huskies, whereas 25 of their victims failed to come any closer than 40 points. At least the Christians never had to return to the floor of the Colosseum after halftime.
The comparisons to Wooden have been made in the past and last weekend arose more fervently as Auriemma and UConn chased history not far from Wooden's hometown of Hall, Indiana. Auriemma, 62, who only met the Wizard of Westwood once, has long been uncomfortable with the comparison.
"The first thing I thought about [Monday] night, when you told me you would ask me that question if we won," Wooden told Rowe on the podium, "was last night, there were something like 20-some of my former players, and we were all in one room, and I just remember taking a step back and looking at all of them and thinking, This is just an unbelievable scene. And they're all here today. And what those 11 titles mean to me is how many great players I've had a chance to coach and how many great people have come through the program.
"It doesn't matter whose name I'm above, whose name I'm under or next to," Auriemma said, "as long as I have those names and those players in my memory, I'm good."
Soon after, departing seniors Stewart and Jefferson went down to their knees as Tuck, a senior who is eligible to return for one more season, lightly touched their shoulders with a cutlass. Then Stewart, who had game-highs of 24 points and 10 rebounds, returned the favor. As the Husky All-Americans played swords with friends, one could not help but marvel at the great American success story that Auriemma represents.
He was brought to the U.S.A. at the age of 7 and became the first person in his family to learn to speak English. As he was growing up, the sport of women's college basketball did not even exist (the first national championship was staged in 1972). Somewhat serendipitously, Auriemma grew up outside Philadelphia, where Cathy Rush would lead tiny Immaculata College to the first three AIAW national championships.
As a young man of college age, Auriemma would work as a counselor at Rush's summer camps. His intelligence, charisma and ambition were evident even then. He now earns approximately $2 million per year coaching what was not considered a revenue sport when Connecticut hired him in 1985. Using Veni, vidi, vici as a mantra for this UConn season is, of course, far too narrow a construct. Those three alliterative Latin verbs also chart the course of Auriemma's life.
The comparisons to Wooden compromises the deeds of both coaches, who after all, did not actually coach the same sport. A comparison to Horatio Alger, however, when tracing the arc of Auriemma's existence, is spot-on.
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